The Louie star dropped by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to promote Saturday's show and revealed that he was less than impressive at Monday's sketch rehearsal.
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"All the writers want their sketch in the show so there's a lot of stakes... I'm in all of [the sketches]. It's not what I do for a living at all," he stressed to Fallon.
He continued: "So I start reading and three sketches in, I figured out that100% of my lines, I did them wrong. Like, I messed them up... They've never cancelled a host.
"My brain went ahead to a moment where [producer] Lorne [Michaels] said, 'OK, let's stop'. And then [he'd] go take some people in a room and say, 'OK there's a hurricane. No-one would blame us if we cancelled'. And I realised they could totally do that!"
Louis CK further commented that he ultimately gained the confidence of the SNL staff by drawing on failures from his stand-up career.
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"I've bombed on stage as a stand-up thousands of times and all that failure is very educating," he recalled. "I'm so happy for all the bad things that happened to me because [this SNL session] was a nightmare, but then I knew from experience to just kind of stay even a little bit and try to find one tiny thing [to do right]."
He went on to say: "I did one [sketch] right and I got a 'Thank god he can do something' [from the writers]. And then it built and it built. Then, it got really great!"
The Louie star's guest on this weekend's SNL is fun., who are also first-time performers on the late-night sketch series.
Saturday Night Live airs at 11.30/10.30c on NBC.
Watch Louis CK discuss his SNL stint on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon below:
